The Paths We Choose To Follow

Thoughts on the war against Iran and the world we live in

Another week, and another war. More unimaginable suffering, pain, and death rained down on people from above.

165 students killed at an elementary school. Seven to twelve-year-old girls. Murdered by US bombs in an illegal war. All amidst the ongoing suffering of so many people in Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan, Congo, Ukraine and so many other places.

Where words fail me, this cartoon by illustrator Loryn Brantz perhaps captures how I feel best:

Source: Instagram

My daughter was born in Canada, in relative safety. I can’t even imagine what the parents of children cruelly taken from them are experiencing, nor those who live in constant danger from bombs or being murdered by their own state.

The constant bombardment of horrific events these past few years has profoundly changed how I view the world. My capacity to take what is spouted by so many has withered away. Sometimes there are horrors you can’t unsee and that you can’t, and shouldn’t, look away from.

Yet for many, me included, life keeps moving forward. Work must be done, bills need to be paid, and mouths need to be fed. We live in “unprecedented times,” yet our days continue to follow the same rhythms as always.

The ongoing rhythm of life makes me think about path dependence and how decisions made many years before shape and build on the technologies and systems in use today.

I believe this is a useful idea to keep in mind when we consider our “unprecedented times.” There is a path dependence in both our day-to-day lives and the world at large.

Sometimes, to know where we are going, we need to know where we have been. While I work on innovation policy today, I am a diplomatic historian by training, and I know well how past decisions influence and shape the challenges we face. They build upon each other and drive events forward, if not in predictable ways, then at least in explainable ones.

Yet history isn’t set in stone. It’s contested. There’s always resistance to looking back to understand how we got here. Omar El Akkad has described this as how “the starting point of history can always be shifted, such that one side is always instigating, the other always justified in response.”

We can clearly see this in this week's events. Yes, the Iranian government is a brutal regime that has caused immense suffering to its people and threatened its neighbours. There’s no denying that. However, that isn’t the starting point of history. The existence of this regime is deeply connected to past Western interventions, especially the US-UK-orchestrated 1953 coup d’état. The repression and corruption that followed under the US-backed Shah are the background to the 1979 revolution, and their ripples are felt now. Similarly, Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with Iran in his first term is not irrelevant when considering any supposed nuclear threat now. 

You can’t simply alter the starting point of history to suit your narrative.

However, while history and context matter, we are not truly locked into any set path. Past cycles of trauma need not mean we are set to create new cycles. Similarly, this broader context doesn’t imply there is a reason or plan behind what we are experiencing.

I think the UK journalist Ian Dunt really captures the recklessness of this moment on his Substack:

Hardly anyone in the mainstream national conversation is prepared to state the basic reality, which is that the world is run by microdick clinically sub-cognitive narcissist madmen who are going to get us all killed. Instead, they project a sense of tactical and political meaning onto what is, basically, the bloodlust of a screaming child.

Yet despite this, politicians across the world, including Mark Carney, ”all fought as hard as they could to pretend that we were living in a world of sanity.”

This pretence of sanity is what I was getting at when I wrote about the hypocrisy of Carney’s Davos speech. As Luke Savage has also argued this week, while that speech spoke of Canada’s principled commitment to fundamental values, including the UN charter, in practice, “the prime minister functionally views human rights and international law as luxuries middle powers like Canada cannot afford to indulge in today’s world.”

Carney called for “acting consistently” and applying “the same standards to allies and rivals.” Yet instead of that, for Lloyd axworthy Canada is acting with an obvious double standard: “when Russia uses force without lawful grounds, it is condemned as an outlaw; when the U.S. does something legally analogous, we kowtow in an effort to curry favour.”

Though it is easy to take the Davos speech to mean that Canada would stand up for international law and be a leading middle power, it was equally as much about how Canada will follow its own narrow self-interest. Carney’s actions this week indicate that he is defining that self-interest as “capitulating to the ‘might is right’ world that Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are intent on forging,” Alex Neve, the former secretary general of Amnesty International Canada, has argued.

This stance neither helps Iranians nor ultimately Canadians. Iranian-Canadian lawyer Amanda Ghahremani has argued that it is a “mockery” for the US and Israel to justify their actions as helping the Iranian people. Instead, the “abandonment of international law” is a “disservice to generations of Iranians to come.”

It is a disservice to Canadians, too. For Axworthy, “middle powers like Canada will someday wish they had defended the UN Charter when they still could.”

My daughter may have been born in the comparative safety of Canada. But what future are my wife and I bringing her up into? What path are we building for her generation and beyond?

These past few years have made it clearer than ever to me how the cowardice of powerful people and their inability to confront the world as it truly is only make the entire world darker and more dangerous for everyone, including right here.

The paths we have laid down before matter, but they need not bind us. We can and must choose new paths that offer a brighter future for children everywhere.